She would help me breathe again, ridding Death from my body, but morning was far away and I was losing the battle.
I couldn’t hold on much longer. As I went in and out of consciousness, Death spoke to me, whispering its quiet intentions. It told me I could lie down and surrender as it naturally plucked me from the Earth the way I thoughtlessly picked flowers. It told me the transformation would be quick and all my struggles would be over. I wanted to give in; I wanted to lie down and relinquish, but I couldn’t. To this day I don’t know what kept me going. My life force refused to hear the solemn sounds of Death, and fought every second for survival. This was proof that the body, of its own accord, wants to live; but Death wasn’t leaving without a fight, tempting me with heaven and its sweet, watery bliss—a place where I could go to avoid all conflict that preceded that moment.
As my spirit began to dim, the lights from my mother’s car rolled across the ceiling like a chariot of horses from the stars. I immediately ran to the door, and when she saw me, she knew I was in bad shape. She seemed angry, not with me or herself, but with my asthma and how frequently I kept getting sick. She couldn’t understand why the hospital kept discharging me when I kept having attacks. I wasn’t embarrassed, as my pride had left and all that remained was my fight for breath. All things mundane and usual were drowned out by the seriousness of my sickness. My mom put me in the car and drove me to my primary care physician. When we got in the examination room he took one look at me and called an ambulance.
I don’t remember what happened next, but when I woke up I was in a room surrounded by machines and nurses. The nurse at my right had a warm smile for me, but had a large needle in her hand; she said she was going to draw blood. I wasn’t afraid of needles, but she was going to draw blood from an artery near my wrist for a blood gas test, an extremely painful procedure where the blood is taken from the radial artery to check the oxygen levels. It felt like a hot poker plunged into my bloodstream. There were multiple injections of medications, oxygen tubes up my nose, and a heparin lock. Still, I couldn’t breathe and wasn’t in a safe zone yet, as the constrictions in my lungs continued.
A week went by, but it felt like a month. Separately, my parents came to visit, and my mom brought my teddy bear Oatmeal to keep me company. I was still very weak. For an athlete, being sick or injured is one of the worst things that can happen. We work so hard to be strong and healthy that when we are not at our optimum level we feel “less than.” Even though I was dreadfully sick, I still had the compulsion to exercise. I knew the other athletes on the team weren’t taking this week off. I kept thinking, What if they learn a harder trick while I’m stuck in this hospital bed? Just thinking about it made my breathing worse, but I had to figure out a way to exercise in bed. Several tests continued to check my lung functions, and the results weren’t good. Every other day I was wheeled down to a room to breathe into a huge fish tank-like machine to check my lung capacity. The oxygen levels in my blood were still below average, and the tests showed lung damage and scar tissue from my asthma.
Another week went by and I was still lying in a hospital bed. The eggshell-white walls and hospital gowns began to drive me crazy. I attempted to do some leg lifts, but got caught by a nurse who yelled at me, saying I was sick in a hospital bed and shouldn’t exercise. I believed exercise would heal me quicker, so I continued the leg lifts after she left the room.
Tara brought me all my missed schoolwork and I did as much as I could, but it was difficult to concentrate. Instead I lay in bed watching daytime TV. Yet another week went by, and I slowly began to recover. The doctors tapered off my nebulizer treatments and promised I could go home in a few days. I was on a chemist’s cocktail of powerful medications when they finally released me from the hospital.
As soon as I got home, I returned to gymnastics. Every move was a struggle; I was extremely out of shape, and I thought my body would never get back to the condition I had previously achieved. To rekindle the fire, I tried to remember the warrior I once was. I thought about all my hard work over the years, trying to reconnect to the boy inside me, the boy who would never quit or give up, and the spark reignited—something telepathically demanded me to keep going. I doubled my workouts and conditioned my body as often as I could. My physical return was much slower than I anticipated, but my soul wouldn’t allow me to quit the fight.
After I was back in competition shape, I thought about Death. I thought about its beauty and power, and knew that beyond the stars and beyond the clouds, it was there, waiting for the end of our fleeting lives.
TODAY WE KNOW THAT FOLLICLES AT THE BASE OF HUMAN HAIRS, FINGERNAILS, AND TOENAILS CONTAIN CELLULAR MATERIAL RICH IN DNA, WHICH CAN BE USED TO DETERMINE THE IDENTITY OF AN INDIVIDUAL. PERHAPS IT’S NO COINCIDENCE THAT ANCIENT VOODOO DOLLS WERE PREPARED USING BITS OF HUMAN HAIR AND NAILS, BECAUSE THEY WERE BELIEVED TO COMPRISE ELEMENTS OF A PERSON’S IDENTITY. THE DOLLS WERE OFTEN USED IN VOODOO RITUALS DESIGNED TO CONTROL, REWARD, OR PUNISH INDIVIDUALS.
I was finally in high school, and naively believed it would be a new start for me with other kids my age. It was a regional school that combined two towns: Norton and Easton. Our small-town group of Easton students did not know the Norton students, and so none of them knew our past. I believed we all secretly wanted to hide our former selves. The girls who were chubby and made fun of, the boys who had peed their pants in second grade, and those caught picking their noses—all wanted their stories to die in the past along with our preteen years and last year’s clothing styles.
This was not a school of higher learning, but an alliance of fallen souls. It was an experiment in socialism and power play executed on a group of same-aged beings desperately trying to find themselves in a culture of unforgiving greed and dominance. Those of us from the Easton schools wanted a new start more than anything—geeks and losers getting a chance to become popular and cool.
Every day I woke up at 6:00 a.m., moments after the sun rose, and prepared for war. We marched into the school building like bloodthirsty zombies out to get tortured—not by our teachers, but by each other—as we tore one another apart, flesh from bone. As the blood and goodness bled out, nothing remained but anguish and despair. The teenage mind and social system is an atom bomb wrapped in denim and designer clothes, drenched in perfume and cologne, and steered by an intellect that thinks it knows everything.
I decided not to tell the new students about my gymnastics. I was already filled with self-hatred that simmered daily to a boil, and I couldn’t stand to add to that. I couldn’t allow the teasing to grow, and I had to strategically reinvent myself. I strived to conceal the passion and love for the art that gave purpose to my life. I tried other sports to fit in, but they just didn’t feel right. I was good at soccer, but my deep romance with movement wouldn’t let me go. Like two star-crossed lovers, gymnastics and I were going to die together.
The new kids in school from Norton were more socially advanced than us in every way. We were the good kids suddenly introduced to a pool of new people who smoked weed, drank beer, and had sex. It seemed like heaven and hell were colliding. Sure, we were teenagers, but I think we were more like angels and demons creating a social nightmare while having to learn irrelevant and untenable things for a future that was permanently held above our heads. As much as we tried to study and become good students, curses and evil intentions won over our minds, and the difference between right and wrong became impossible to tell. In our teenage years we were completely powerless over all of that, but I was determined not to fall victim to peer pressure. I had firsthand experiences at home of the destructive and insidious nature of drinking and smoking, and I knew those temptations would pull me away from my Olympic dreams.
High school is an exaggerated microcosm of the world in which we live, and despite my attempts at disguising myself,
